"Boss Tweed" feminism
By Wendy McElroy
web posted December 17, 2001
The ideal of equal representation for women in democratic
governments around the globe sounds praiseworthy. But its
implementation has little to do with "equality" or "democracy."
Instead, it has become a policy of privilege and quota, driven by
elite powers that disregard the wishes of "the people" in regions
where it is applied. It is affirmative action applied to the political
realm.
The Afghan Women's Summit for Democracy ended with a
demand that women be included in the post-Taliban government,
including its grand assembly, the loya jirga. The demand goes
well beyond Afghanistan's pre-Taliban 1964 constitution that
included universal suffrage and equal rights for women. Women
voters generally prefer male candidates. Even in Western nations
like the United States, the "ideal" of equal representation has not
been achieved.
To ensure that women become government officials in sufficient
numbers, organizations such as the United Nations and the
Feminist Majority, an American group, are basically trying to rig
the election. They're not trying to control the voting — just the
nominations. In the 19th century, Boss Tweed — possibly the
most corrupt politician America has produced — declared, "I
don't care who does the electing just so long as I do the
nominating."
This affirmative action "rigging" system is already in operation in
Kosovo, where the parliament functions under a U.N.-mandated
quota guaranteeing women will constitute close to a third of its
members. Every third candidate in the 2001 election had to be a
woman. The gender quota system was combined with a system
of "proportional representation," which basically meant that seats
were allocated in proportion to the votes each party received.
Many European nations embrace a quota system in nominating
candidates, but Kosovo "guarantees" a high election of women
whether or not people would have voted for them otherwise. In
the November 2001 election, 28 percent of offices went to
women.
The system has stirred a backlash of criticism, including from
Kosovo's women's movements. In response to the charge that
rigging a "free" election gave only the appearance of representing
women, Liz Hume, a legal adviser to OSCE — the U.N.
organization that oversees elections in Kosovo — offered a
strange defense. "You could say that they [elected women] are
the pawns of their parties, but so are the men," a BBC News
report quotes Hume as saying.
The appearance is clearly important as the United Nations
wishes the system to spread. "Kosovo is blazing a trail, many
democracies are lagging behind on this," Kosovo's U.N.
administrator, Bernard Kouchner, has declared.
Indeed, the call for quota systems within government has been
foreshadowed for some while on the United Nations' Web site.
In the women's section of the site, Section Two of the
Conference of Women Members of South Eastern European
Parliaments — Women in Electoral Campaigns — is a call for a
quota system along the lines used in Argentina, and now in
Kosovo.
Cries for political quotas are becoming more common. In the
West, quota-advocate feminists speak euphemistically of
"including the voices of women in government." But the goal has
shifted from giving women the vote on an equal footing with men
to enforcing the presence of women in governmental bodies.
According to their theory, the lack of female officials is the direct
result of discrimination that must be rectified by government
policy.
Those who argue for a political quota system to secure equality
within a democratic process must answer two questions: What is
your definition of "equality?" Of "democracy?"
Feminism is the belief that women and men should be treated as
equals, but the definition of "equality" can differ widely. To
individualist feminists, or ifeminists, equality means identical
treatment under laws that protect person and property. It is an
equality of rights, not of results. If women cast a ballot as men
do, then women's political will has been actualized even if no
females are elected.
Because gender feminism defines equality in socio-economic
terms, it seeks to reorganize society to redistribute political,
economic and cultural power from men to women. This equality
of results, not rights, leads to legal privileges for women, such as
mandatory placement on ballots.
In Europe, the term "affirmative action" is publicly applied to
political representation. In America, the discussion usually occurs
within gender feminism or academia. An example is the 1998
Harvard paper, "Women in Politics: The Quota System," by
Mala Htun. Htun looks to Latin American countries like
Argentina for inspiration. In a manner similar to Kosovo's,
Argentina has dramatically increased the number of women
"elected." The United Nations was instrumental there as well.
The second question for these advocates is, "What is your
definition of 'democracy?'" The standard definition is
"government in which the supreme power is vested in the people
and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a
free electoral system."
Yet the "Boss Tweed" version of controlling nominations is
designed to override the will of the people. Political elites —
most prominently, the United Nations and gender feminists —
want to dictate who can be a candidate specifically because the
common people do not elect the "right" people in the proper
ratio. This is profoundly anti-democratic.
A brief column, like this one, can only touch on an issue. But I
offer a question that has haunted me during my research. Since
when has North America started looking to Argentina for lessons
on good government?
Wendy McElroy is the editor of Ifeminists.com. She also edited
Freedom, Feminism, and the State (Independent Institute, 1999)
and Sexual Correctness: The Gender Feminist Attack on
Women (McFarland, 1996). She lives with her husband in
Canada.
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